1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of measuring software ease of use.
2. Background Description
Most software systems and applications provide at least one user interface. Such an interface may be graphical or it may be provided by a text input from a terminal, or from a set of dedicated peripheral devices. Similarly most applications, middleware and solutions provide user interfaces for purposes of configuring and installation. A user interface is required every time a person is expected to be the user of a software system or application.
It is always desirable, for efficiency purposes, to make interfaces as user-friendly as possible. The existing art, however, does not provide adequate quantitative methods to measure either ease of use or human-friendliness of a user interface in a manner that provides a sufficient correlation to the experience of a human being in configuring, installing and using the software.
Because ease of use is largely a matter of a user's subjective state of mind, which may not be susceptible to direct measurement, quantification of ease of use has relied on developing cognitive complexity metrics that are based on measurements of user interface actions, such as mouse clicks or other user interventions necessary to complete a process, which are more susceptible than a user's subjective state of mind to direct measurement and quantification. The number of mouse clicks required to accomplish a step, or the number of steps required to complete a process are only an approximate heuristic. Two clicks can be easier than one click if it is difficult to find the appropriate place to click in an one-click interface. For example, one click from a pull-down menu of very large items is not necessarily more user-friendly than two clicks from a set of appropriately-nested and well-presented pull-down menus arranged to provide information to a user without significant searching or scrolling. Similarly, two interfaces, both requiring a single click, may differ in ease of use if they impose different requirements on a user who is required to scroll or search through information in order to find the appropriate place to click. Since there is no way to understand the actual effect on the human beings, these metrics fall short of a satisfactory measure. Some measures of ease of configuration count the number of user steps required to configure a software application. However, these suffer from comparable limitations, in that a single step that is time-consuming to perform can be more frustrating to users than two or three steps, each of which takes a relatively small amount of time to perform.
Thus, the existing art does not provide an adequate quantitative determination of software ease of use.